Cati Coe
Transnational migration, Care, Aging, Social Protection Policy, West Africa
| Degrees: | BA (Hons, Wesleyan), MA and PhD (University of Pennsylvania) |
| Email: | Cati.Coe@carleton.ca |
| Office: | C677 Loeb Building |
| CV: | View |
| Website: | Visuals |
Professor
Cati Coe is the Canada Research Chair in Migration and Care and Professor of Political Science at Carleton University. Dr. Coe is an internationally recognized leader in the scholarship of transnational families, aging, and care work, winning awards for her previous books The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality (2013), The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers (2019), and Changes in Care: Aging, Migration and Social Class in West Africa (2021). She is known for her careful analysis of how parents’ migration can cause various degrees of rupture in transnational families, her argument that international migration should be studied within the framework of the longer history and broader phenomenon of urban migration, and her leadership in initiating a new focus on children’s experiences within the field of migration studies.
Cati Coe joined the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in 2022, arriving from Rutgers University in the United States, where she worked as a professor of anthropology for twenty years. She is currently researching how transnational migrants navigate national forms of social protection in later life, which includes historical research into the residency requirements of Canadian pensions which limit its transnational portability. From her scholarship on African immigrant care workers in the United States, she has additional research interests in care worker organizing and resistance and the labor involved in end-of-life care.
As part of making her research more broadly available to the public, Dr. Coe has regularly written opinion essays and made two documentary films, “Stories from Home Care” (2021) based on the narratives of a personal support worker from Ghana working with older adults in the United States, and “Making Happiness: Older People Organize Themselves” (2020) about a social club for older adults in Ghana.
Selected Publications
Special issue of “Organizing Domestic Work: The Limits of Regulations in the Wake of the ILO Domestic Workers Convention.” Anthropology of Work Review 45:2 (2024). Edited with Alana Lee Glaser.
“Age Enterprising: ‘Old’ Age on the Make in Ghana.” With Alexandra Crampton. Journal of Aging Studies 71 (2024). https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1jyhz3AT7iaPdF
“Where to Age? Social Protection in Retirement and Return Decisions among Aging Migrants.” Academic commentary for special issue “On Aging Globally,” for the essay section of American Ethnologist, 2024.
“Racialization and Ethnicization of African Caregiving Migrants in the U.S.” In Migration, Ethnicity, and Diversity, edited by Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda, pp. 109-123. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024.
“The Contradictions of Transnational Care: Imaginaries and Materialities of Social Protection in Return to Ghana.” In States of Return: Rethinking Migration and Mobility, edited by Deborah Boehm and Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar, pp. 140-161. New York: New York University Press, 2024.
“The Commodification of Care: Does Paying for Elder Care Matter?” Anthropology of Work Review 45:1 (2024): 5-13.
“Images of Care: A Pedagogy of Rosiness about Aging Transitions,” with Sheridan Conty (graduate student). Journal of Aging Studies 68 (2024).